1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to manufacturing, delivery of services, and other organizational activities about which data describing process flows are collected. More specifically, the present invention relates to a system for managing process flow information related to a multiplicity of interrelated organizational tasks.
2. Background Art
Organizations engage in activities to achieve organizational goals. For a manufacturing organization, such activities may relate to the manufacture of a product or of several products. For a provider of services, such activities may relate to the performance of a service or of many different services. In many organizations, and particularly in large or complex organizations, the manufacture of products and the performance of services require the completion of a large number of diverse activities in specific sequences relative to one another to achieve organizational goals. In order to manage these activities, organizations often perform information gathering and processing tasks related to describing the activities and their relative order. Such descriptions are referred to as process flows and may characterize the manufacturing of products, the performance of services, or other organizational goals. These process flows are useful in planning, simulating, and controlling realization of the described products and services.
Conventional systems for managing process flows are typically adapted to describe a relatively simple organization. Such simple organizations have no more than a few products or services to be described with process flows. Critical Path Method (CPM), Project Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT), and Material Requirements Planning (MRP) represent a few of the conventional techniques which support and manage process flows. When more complex organizations utilize such conventional systems, they are forced to duplicate or repeat usage of the systems for various products or services. As a result, the process flows for these products or services are independent from one another. In other words, process flows are constructed and exist in isolation of one another.
However, in reality different products and services of a complex organization tend to be interrelated with one another. For example, diverse products and services must compete to receive commonly used resources. Thus, these diverse products and services are related to one another through their demands for commonly used resources. Likewise, economies of scale may be realized by identifying and forcing roughly equivalent components of diverse process flows to be more similar. For example, if a "widget" product requires the use of one brand of red paint and a "gadget" product requires the use of another brand of red paint, two different brands of red paint must be purchased, inventoried, and managed. However, by recognizing the similarity between the paint requirements and forcing one of the products to use the other product's brand of paint, economies of scale are achieved in purchasing larger quantities of a single brand of paint and in inventorying only one brand of paint. Accordingly, diverse products and services are related through similar components between the products' and services' process flows.
Due to this interrelation between products and services of a complex organization, conventional systems fail to provide satisfactory process flows. Specifically, conventional process flow information management systems fail to promote standardization in characterizing process flows related to diverse organizational tasks. Consequently, opportunities for achieving economies of scale are missed. Moreover, process flow information quickly gets out of control, and organizations must expend large quantities of organizational resources to manage numerous process flows.
Furthermore, conventional systems for managing process flow information fail to satisfactorily account for the dispersion of expert knowledge within a typical complex organization. Thus, such systems inadequately permit a single person to create, modify, and otherwise manage, for the entire organization, many related process flows. Consequently, the expert's knowledge is often used inefficiently by the organization while non-experts manage flows related to areas beyond their expertise. Inaccurate and incomprehensive process flows result.